Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline. With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists. " Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is one of the most remarkable texts in all of American labor fiction. Its author, widely regarded as 'incorruptible' in a union world where corruption threatened on all sides, was a veritable god to his labor devotees―for good reason―and never mind his literary drift toward political sectarianism. This is a novel that will be widely enjoyed and appreciated!"―Paul Buhle, retired senior lecturer, Brown University, and coeditor of Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land "This is an important literary document that vividly recounts a turbulent time of Jewish working-class struggle."―Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History, University of Wisconsin–Madison "A fascinating document of two disappeared worlds: Rural Jewish life before immigration produced the foundational experiences that made struggles for organized labor at the center of our contributions to American life. But Ben Gold's novel of frontline living also reminds us of a time when the "right wing" of Jewish politics was the Socialist Party, and many factions of the Yiddish world reached for different utopian visions of collective equality and liberation. Annie Kaufman's erudite introduction contextualizes the world of Jewish gangsters trying to break Jewish unions, and leaders daring to reach across race and ethnicity to unite the working-class. Her buoyant translation recalls the old, fallen dreams of one party that would answer everybody's needs, and bitter pills of complexity dividing friends and lovers. A great read and a crucial reminder."―Sarah Schulman, professor, playwright, author A working-class radical revolutionary's tale--penned by a prominent union leader--now available in English. Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this proletarian, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. After immigrating to New York City as a young adult, he dedicates himself entirely to his union and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. With bold original illustrations by leftist Jewish cartoonist William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's fresh translation revives Gold's emotionally rich narrative and reveals some of the most daring efforts in America's suppressed Communist history. Ben Gold was born in Bessarabia in the Russian Empire in 1898 and immigrated to the US with his family in 1912. He worked in the fur industry and served as the president of the International Furriers Union, leading the legendary 1926 strike. A member of the US Central Committee of the Communist Party, Gold was forced out of the labor movement by the Taft Hartley Act and the second Red Scare. He went on to write Your Comrade, Avreml Broide and several other novels in Yiddish before his death in 1985. Annie Sommer Kaufman is a scholar of the US and the former Soviet Union, where she spent considerable time and studied Yiddish with novelist Yekhiel Shraybman. This translation was supported by a fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts (2020–21).